Saturday, September 30, 2017

With Halloween only a month away, I thought I'd start a
series of blogs representing the spirit
of the holiday.

According to Chinese legend, hungry and restless ghosts roam
the world to visit their living descendants.

Traditional Chinese belief has the seventh month of the
lunar year reserved for the Hungry Ghost festival (Yu Lan). For 2017, the
festival starts on September 5th. This is a boisterous celebration of feasts
and music. According to Chinese folklore, the ghosts who wander the physical
world are ravenous and envious after dying without descendants or because they
are not honored by relatives who are still alive.

Because the hungry spirits need to be appeased, prayers and
incense are offered to deceased relatives. Fake currency, known as hell money, along with paper copies of
material wealth are burned. The ghosts then use them when they return to the
underworld.

Neighborhoods hold nightly shows of Chinese operas and pop
concerts. The front row of seats remain empty because they are reserved for the
ghosts. These shows are accompanied by extravagant feasts. On the 15th day of
the lunar month, families offer cooked food to the ghosts with the hope that
the spirits will help them find good jobs, get good grades, or even win the
lottery.

Tradition holds that there are 14 things you should not do
during the Hungry Ghost Festival month:

1) Don't stay out
late at night, spirits might follow you home

2) Don't stab
your chopsticks on your bowl of rice, it resembles the joss sticks offerings to
the dead

3) Don't take
photos at night, they might capture things you don't want to see

4) Don't
celebrate your birthday at night

5) Don't open an
umbrella, especially a red one, in the house

6) Avoid working
late during this month

7) Don't cover
your forehead

8) Don't play
games that can attract spirits such as Ouija Board

9) Don't wait at
a bus stop after midnight

10) Don't use black
or a dark color nail polish, the spirits might think you are one of them

11) Don't enter a
cemetery or abandoned house

12) Don't spit or
blow your nose in public or at a tree/plant

13) Don't lean
against the wall, spirits like to stick on walls because they're cooler

14) Don't turn your
head around if someone pats you on the shoulder

Next week in my spirit
of Halloween series, I'll be posting a blog about America's Haunted Hotels.

Saturday, September 23, 2017

As we all know, Christmas is December 25th. But it seems to
arrive earlier each year. The end of summer/official start of autumn (here in
the northern hemisphere) was yesterday—Friday, September 22, 2017. We've barely
cleared the summer season. Halloween is still over a month away and
Thanksgiving is two months away. But none of that seems to make any difference.

As far as some retailers are concerned, Christmas is already
here. In fact, it's been here for a while. Yep…that's right. There are Christmas
decorations, Christmas cards, Christmas wrapping paper, and other things
Christmas in the stores next to the displays of Halloween candy and masks. I've
been receiving Christmas Cards—buy now
and get a special discount solicitations since August.

It's a little disconcerting. Winter weather is definitely
not here. There's nothing outside that even pretends to resemble the pictures
on Christmas cards showing the snow-laden pine and fir trees, pristine snow
covering the landscape (before it turns to dirty slush), and a perfect snowman
out there in the wilderness complete with top hat rather than the lopsided snowman
in someone's front yard. And there's the charming country cottage with the
smoke curling from the chimney and an old-fashioned sleigh being pulled by a
horse.

How can you even think of chestnuts roasting on an open fire
and Jack Frost nipping at your nose when the temperature for the last several
days has been in the mid to high 90s? I do realize there are many places where
nice warm weather is common at Christmas time. In the U.S., Hawaii and southern
Florida come to mind. And, of course, in the southern hemisphere Christmas
arrives in the middle of summer. But even with the places in the U.S. that
experience warm weather year round, wouldn't it be nice to get Halloween and
Thanksgiving out of the way before concentrating on Christmas?

I, personally, would rather finish with one holiday before
embarking on the next one. Maybe that has to do with my childhood. My birthday
is in mid December and my parents always made sure that it was clearly
separated from Christmas. The tree and decorations did not go up until after my
birthday.

Saturday, September 16, 2017

Friday, September 22, 2017, marks the official end of summer
and start of autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere—the Autumnal Equinox.

Earlier this month in my little corner of the world we had a
delightful taste of the fall weather to come.
That crisp feel in the air with cooler temperatures replacing the heat
and dryer air shoving aside the retched humidity of summer. That change to cool dry air brought a renewed
vigor, a revived energy to replace the lackluster feeling resulting from the
summer heat and humidity...at least for me.
(Do you get the impression that I don't function well in heat and humidity?)

Just as I love the renewal of life in the spring—bright
green new leaves on the trees, colorful flowers, the awakening of nature from
winter's long hibernation—I also love the change of the leaves to their
brilliant array of fall colors in autumn. This year we've exceeded our average amount of
rainfall, so I'm hoping for a more colorful autumn than we've had the last
couple of years.

I can say with all sincerity that I'm happy to welcome the
end of summer. Oh, yeah…also happy to
welcome the start of fall. But it's
mostly the end of summer's heat and humidity that thrills me. I do have to
admit that the summer of 2017 was a strange mixture of several triple digit
temperature days and periods of cooler temperatures. However, we did have many
super high humidity days. Ugh!

Welcome autumn...I'm thrilled to see you! But, on the other hand, I'm hoping for a mild
winter.

Saturday, September 2, 2017

On August 21, 2017, a total solar eclipse was visible in the
U.S. literally from coast to coast as it moved across the country—from the
Pacific Ocean on the west coast to the Atlantic Ocean on the east coast. I
traveled to an area where I could see the total solar eclipse. The area we
selected was the town of Hiawatha, Kansas, (population of a little over 3000)
in the far northeast corner of the state.
In Wichita, where I currently live, the eclipse was going to be 94%. But
when a 3.5 hour drive can get the total eclipse, we decided that was the thing
to do.

In Hiawatha (central time zone), the eclipse started at
11:39AM and concluded at 2:33PM with totality occurring at 1:06PM and lasting
for 2 minutes and 34 seconds.

We bought our eclipse glasses about 2 weeks in advance. I
spent lots of time going over all the settings on my DSLR camera that I don't
normally use to make sure I could photograph everything with quick efficiency. Traffic-wise,
we anticipated crowded roads so we left before daylight. The drive up was
surprisingly quick and easy, normal traffic moving along as highway speeds.

Rather than finding a quiet place on a country road
somewhere, we headed for Hiawatha's city park which had been set up as the
center of eclipse activity. Parking was a reasonable $5. Just 2 blocks away
from the city park, a church was charging $20 for use of their parking lot
(however, I suspect that it might have been an overnight parking fee for motor
homes and recreational vehicles).

At the city park, the main recreation building housed a
demonstration and talk by NASA personnel in the auditorium and the gym had been
opened for children. Outside in the open grassy areas, a band provided live
music, one of the television stations (I'm assuming from Topeka, Ks) set up for
a live broadcast, about a dozen food trucks were on site and they offered a
wide variety of choices rather than everything being the same. Lots of picnic
tables and even a beer garden. There were, of course, the normal mandatory
souvenir stands selling T-shirts and other Eclipse-themed items. But the main
attraction was the rapidly approaching time for the eclipse.

clouds closing in as eclipse starts

Since viewing the sun at mid day is a matter of looking
straight up rather than at a stage, there were no bad seats. Everyone was the
same 93 million miles away from the show with an unobstructed view of the event.

But…as the old saying goes, into every life a little rain must fall. And so it was on August
21, 2017, in Hiawatha, Kansas.

That whole portion of the state had been having off and on
rain for several days. The forecast for Hiawatha for August 21 said partly
cloudy with possibility of showers. The morning looked pretty good, then the
clouds rolled in. But we weren't worried. It was not a solid cloud cover, it
was your basic intermittent coming and going cloud cover with the sun visible
most of the time.

last picture before clouds cut off view

Until about 12:30, approximately an hour into the eclipse
and half an hour prior to totality, when the partially cloudy turned into definite
storm clouds and started to rain. And that pretty much describes the weather
for the rest of the day.

However, the 2 minutes 34 seconds of totality was not lost
on us even though the sun/eclipse was not visible. The cloud cover broke at the
horizon. As anticipated, the sky became dark (however not black like midnight
on a moonless night) and street lights came on in response. The temperature
noticeably dropped, but the rain helped that along. The most intriguing part of
the obscured eclipse was the color and feel of the air.

The color was twilight, but not really. A combination of
many hues, but no specific one. A soft glow that seemed to surround rather than
coming from a single direction.

When I say feel,
I'm not referring to the sense of touch. The feel was somehow ethereal—aesthetic
rather than tactile. The very air surrounding us oozed an almost surreal awareness,
a sensation of awe, a perception that can't be explained using mere words.

after the eclipse

But reality soon set in. What was a 3.5 hour drive to
Hiawatha, Kansas, was an 8 hour drive home. The highway was literally a parking
lot.

Even though we could not see the moment of totality, the
experience was well worth the trip.

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